Journal Launches with Unseen Mark Twain Letter

New literary journal China Grove launched August 28, and will feature a previously unseen letter from Mark Twain regarding an unpublished work called “The Great Republic’s Peanut Stand.” The journal will also feature an exclusive interview with Ellen Gilchrist, and a love letter from Pulitzer Prize winner Eudora Welty to crime fiction writer Kenneth Millar. The journal’s name comes from the Eudora Welty short story, “Why I Live at the P. O.”

Edited by Dr. Scott Anderson, MD, and Dr. Luke Lampton, MD, the journal will pair fiction from new writers alongside literary giants like Twain. Anderson said: “Our goal is to give talented newcomers a chance to be published next to legends, and to see the history of what it is they’ve chosen to pursue as a vocation.”

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Birthdays

On this day, March 19, in 1933, Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey (which was to factor greatly as the setting for his acclaimed 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint). His first book, a collection of fiction which he called Goodbye, Columbus, won the National Book Award in 1960; the novella of the same name from that collection was later made into a movie which ended up being one of the most popular films of 1969. He also won the National Book Award in 1995 for Sabbath’s Theater, and in 1997 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for American Pastoral. Many of his books dealt with autobiographical themes and the Jewish-American experience; today he turns 85.